So I will speak on this as a GMM.
Whenever we have events on the main server we have to consider a few factors when planning our events.
1. Server Population - As a general rule we avoid using ships on 100+ to avoid causing massive lag and ruin it for the whole server.
2. Server population distribution - We see exactly who is active at the time, we try to tailor the events to what kind of population is active and still try to give everyone something to do.
3. Dupes that are down - If people are doing tryouts/trials (SOBDE and Jedi) if people have dupes down it can quickly limit what we can do without impacting server performance, keeping in mind server pop.
We try to incorporate pilots whenever we can but we also have to consider the above 3 factors and the lore/story of our event.